KlaudiaKatastrofale Reviews

The Crimson Kimono (1959)

Luckily, there's Chris around so the boys can fall in love with each other

[17 May 2023]

So, this murder mystery begins with a murder in full view of practically everyone in the room and on the street, but strangely enough, nobody seems to have seen what has just transpired in front of their eyes. The murderer gets away, and the sleuthing ensues. But the opening scene is exactly the basic tone set for this film that many (re)viewing the film seem to fail to hear due to the seemingly louder racial overtones.

In fact, it takes just one slight "turn of the screw" to see/hear things clearly. Let's take a look at this dialogue between the two male leads with slight attuning:

• (Joe:) I didn't want to hit you that way, Charlie. But it's not normal to keep my feelings bottled up. That's it. It's out. It hurts, and there's nothing I can do about it. ............ Say something! Blow your top! Belt me! You've got the right to belt me!

• (Charlie:) You mean you wanna marry C h r i s?

• (Joe:) You wouldn't have said it that way if I were s t r a i g h t!

• (Charlie:) What are you talking about?!

• (Joe:) Look at you! It's all over your face! /.../ The thought's made you sick to your stomach!

And so the cat's out of the closet ...that is: bag, and the two males who entered this murder mystery sleeping together ... in the same apartment, that is, now part glances and go each his own way only to be reunited again by Chris (Chris? Oh, yes! That We-thought-you-were-a-man-Chris!) who finally sees the right lead right in front of his ... her eyes and the murder mystery is solved! How? Well, had they looked what they had had laid out in front of them all the time they would've spared themselves much fuss. But it's how they all got wiser. In their own words:

• (Joe:) I don't know how to tell you now how I feel.

• (Charlie:) You don't have to. It's all over your face. /.../ But as for you and me, Joe ... you know, I'm just as glad as you that you finally wrapped up your own case.

And remember, these two males had had a sword fight along the way!

The Public Woman (1984)

Yet another incomprehensible, unwatchable, unredeemable mess from Zulawski

[25 March 2023]

1 star.

Yes: again we are treated to a mess of histrionics, arm-flailings, neurotic marching to and fro, screaming, agonizing and despairing, with actors "method-acting" what the director must have been yelling at them at any random moment, like "Show me fear!" "Show me anger!" "Show me agony!" "Show me madness!" and what have you, resulting in a string of scenes coming from nowhere and going to no better end. We may discern some artistic and political topics of the day, but as is usual with such pretentious egotrips we mainly see that someone must have been primarily interested in sex scenes with the intention of ogling the nudity of the actress. Everything around that was just a smoke screen to feign "artistic motivation".

. Many reviewers praise the leading actress Valerie Kaprisky, but we mustn't overlook the fact that they are all males salivating over her onscreen full frontal and rear nudity. It may be high time that somene had pointed out that this actress is just plain ugly ... when you care to look higher from her breasts.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

History repeats itself: novelist Robert Musil writes his novel "The Man Without Qualities" again.

[26 October 2018]

🌟1/10

It's simply a crime to make a movie about Freddie Mercury and make him look like a man without qualities! It's not the actor Rami Malek, he's fine. It's not the rest of the cast, they're fine. It's not even the script as a plan in general - the plan to make a movie along these lines is also fine. It's the depiction of Freddie Mercury as a man who can only speak in one-liners, and slowly at that, a man who is just there in the room without any real presence, as if at a costume party where a princess arrives and maybe everyone wows at her costume, but in the room she has no more authority of a princess than on any average day (what else could you expect?). Thus Freddie Mercury in this movie just is and nothing much happens with or around him. That's atrocious! Freddie Mercury was a workaholic (partying included), a musical genius entirely devoted to music! Not a man without qualities who just is there not really knowing what to do! Such a sad waste!

A Quiet Place (2018)

A capitalistic paradise: make a sound (like, for example, "trade union" or "wage raise" or "workers' rights") and you get killed

[12 April 2018]

According to a certain report, there are 42 individuals today in this world who hold as much wealth as 3,7 billion people around the globe together. And in the USA alone there are only three - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett - who have as much wealth as 160 million of fellow citizens. So, what do we see in the movie? We see that there are presumably only three monsters that terrorize the land, a county which population seems to be drastically decimated, but reports show that the world at large fared even worse. It looks like there are very few humans left altogether.

Now, many have argued that this is nonsensical. How could a bunch of blind, unintelligent, and basically very primitive and vulnerable monsters have wiped out almost the entire humanity? How could there not have been anyone, not even the many governments and their militaries with all their subsidized industry, who would figure out the means to counter the monsters and destroy them? Why have the survivors so readily complied to their new ways of living in fear, scarcity, limitation, and imminent death?

The question, however, should be posed differently. What if it's not fear and brutality and scarcity that the survivors live in, but the other way around: what if this is exactly the kind of world that brings them happiness, joy, fulfillment, and stability? True, the monsters are brutal, dangerous, and malevolant, but there are so few of them. And it turns out they are not as death-proof as people around the world seem to have taken for granted. Yet, they, those very few monsters, have managed to kill off entire populations without anyone actually trying to revolt against them, to strike back. So the people must have felt happy about the occupation by the monsters? They only needed first to figure out some basic rules - one of them being "Do not make a sound" -, and everything could be as perfect as ever.

In the real world of today, there are 42 individuals who have as much wealth as 3,7 billion (billion!) of humans on the planet together. And 3 individuals in the USA whose wealth equals to that of 160 million of other people together. Yet, everything seems to be as perfect as ever. No-one objects. No-one revolts. No-one strikes back. Billions against 42, millions against 3, yet the math doesn't work the usual way. It's not the millions and billions that outnumber 3 and 42, but the other way around. So, which is then more illogical: the real world where 42 individuals outnumber billions of individuals, and 3 that outnumber millions, or the movie where 3 monsters hold sway of the whole country?

The movie presents a perfect vision of a capitalistic paradise. Firstly, you're not allowed to speak, to make yourself heard (you can do it only when there are louder sounds around that subdue your own - the sounds of sweatshop factories of Apple, Microsoft, Nike etc.). Secondly, you're not allowed to walk anywhere except as designated, a narrow path through abundant woods and fields - you are only leasing your living ground from the 'entities', the 'powers that be' (oil pipelines through the land of Native Americans). And thirdly, the ripe crops in front of your nose are not for you to reap and eat (a Monsanto lawyer will claim the crop belongs to the company whose GMOs have been found in your fields which means you have violated their patent rights). It's a capitalist's heaven! Try and make a noise, and you're eaten alive in no time! But you can still have a baby. Those billions of people around the world still decide to have babies, don't they? So, why is there such an outcry against the characters in the movie who decide to give birth to another human being into this world? Is it because the world into which they'd bring this new human is so atrocious? Is that so? With only 3 monsters roaming around? The real world of today in which the billions are living is clenched in the fists of 42 individuals. And no-one seems to mind. *

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015)

Superb anti-socialist propaganda

[27 September 2015]

When we try to fully understand the drabness and dullness of this movie, we need to ask ourselves first: Where did we hear the slogan "Wicked is good!" before? In the prevailing newspeak of present day where dumbness is neatly packed in frilly wrappings of hipster iteration ("dumb is new dumb", "orange is new black", "30s are new 20s" etc.) we might be tempted to see it simply as yet another joke, another booby trap to fascinate the ever regressing young adults – who in this movie, judging by Theresa's first gynecologic examination at the station, look like they're barely in their teens –, but this would in fact lead us in the wrong direction, namely, in the coil of this hipsterish newspeak itself.

"Wicked is good!", then, comes directly from the Wall Street slogan "Greed is good!" It exploits the same twist of distribution of ethics and hedonism in the Corporation-Individual dyad, where Corporate merges not with ethics, but hedonism, and Individual not with hedonism, but ethics, in order, of course, to persuade you that it's not the Corporate ethics according to which you work and earn your pay for individual hedonism, but it's your own Individual ethics according to which you strive to have a share in hedonistic pleasures ("the Good") provided by the Corporation (making you look vile and vulgar, of course, if anything goes wrong, like impoverishment of local communities and lands and countries for the resources).

In this respect this movie is much subtler than the Wall Street. When the Wall Street says "Greed is good!" it throws money at you and presents you with all the vulgar paraphernalia of corporate hedonism which then make for a visually stunning story. But The Maze Runner 2 says something completely different when it says "Wicked is good!" When it says "Wicked is good!" it doesn't put much effort into showing off this goodness (as Wall Street does), but instead immediately offers you the alternative: "If you don't believe that Wicked is good, then go ahead! Run away and see how much you'll like it in a drab, boring world of social justice, empathy, equality, and dull socialist guerrilla fighting in the mountains where even girls are not sexual objects of men but some righteous social workers who care for everyone equally! Go! But remember, Wicked is good!" And what the movie does, is exactly that: fulfilling this anti-socialist agenda by following a bunch of children on a horrendously drab and boring journey to … To where exactly?

And here we reveal the meaning of what Wicked is! It is extremely simple, but so much more effective: Wicked is good! Greed is good! Google is good! Apple is good! Facebook is good! The children are let to escape into the drab world of social justice which is a world of no trappings, which is a world of no apps! In other words: world of a boring movie. Which is boring for the exact same reason the landscape and the journey in it are boring: it wants the children and us to realize that we must come back! When the children actually turn back, it looks like their social consciousness is speaking: we must fight for our rights! We must fight for justice! We must fight for equality! But what is actually speaking here is the political unconscious. Thomas says he wants to save Minho, but he's actually saying: I want to get away from this drab social equality and justice with no apps! He's been in the movie long enough (and bored enough) to know. We must go back to the world of Wicked that can provide us with a cure. A cure the corporate leader has sworn by her individual ethics that she'd get it no matter the cost! A cure called the algorithm. Algorithm that will once and for all glue us all to the world of trappings, the world of apps, the world of corporate hedonism! Wicked is good! Greed is good! Google is good! Apple is good! Facebook is good!

Jurassic World (2015)

Corporate patent wars, or: Aunts are new MILFs

[11 June 2015]

Perhaps the hardest to answer and most suspenseful question here is: Will they have sex? And the answer is nonetheless the reassuring: Yes! The corporate dominatrix in white, and a smelly low-class wage-worker have conveniently all the dinosaurs at hand to fill the gap between their social statuses and bring each other closer, which is all the more reassuring since the same-level love passes don't seem to yield much success (the adolescent boy is ignored by girls his age, the control-room employee is turned down by his coworker etc.), so a single, childless, unscrupulous corporate ladder-climber in her prime can this never come under suspicion that she may perhaps be a lesbian ... or perhaps is just not interested in THAT kind of guys ... or is perhaps simply in a phase when she doesn't want to get involved etc. No, the dinosaurs are here to prove that "life finds its way", that a woman always "finds a man", even though he may be better at communicating with extinct creatures than with a woman. They are the bridge, the stepping stones for a woman to bring her to a man. And this is exactly what's so uplifting and positive about the dinosaurs! They're the age-old guarantors that a woman always "knows her place" (beside a man), that she has a "dinosaurian" instinct that guides her to the man, that she readily, instinctively knows at all times what the man wants even though he may speak only the dinosaur language and never care to translate it to the woman - she will know it, will instinctively understand it ("see a man = fall in love with a man")! That's why we must also never wonder how come that with such over-protective, over-attached sentimental mothers (represented here by the mother of two adolescent boys who come to visit their aunt, their mother's sister, at the Park) their sons never grow up homosexuals: when they're handed over to an aunt like that who is backed by herds of dinosaurs (her "dinosaurian instincts"), they couldn't go astray even if they wanted to. Their visit to the island is their passage to the manhood, and their aunt has the role of high priestess to see them through.

But if dinosaurs figure here as vehicles for millennia of normative heterosexuality, they are also rather flamboyant representatives of this brim of the time axis called IT age. What if you substitute the dinosaurs with Apple and Samsung? And throw in a bunch of patent- stealing manufacturers from China and India? What if the Jurassic World is a world of IT companies? Competing with their rivals, imitators, and replicators? Stealing from each other and getting stronger and smarter, lawsuit-wise, each time they do it? Or better still - what if the Jurassic World is a world of war, not just a corporate war, but shoot- to-kill war? A war where you mingle with "genetic code" of a foreign country in order to produce loyal killing machines in service of your corporate interests, but then these killing machines turn against you? You've brought a corporate = democratic patent to tame innately untameable creatures, but these have stolen your patent and made a new product which is now here to destroy you, the original patent-bringer. What do you do in such a Jurassic World? Can you take a step back and see it's a world of extinction? Or you embrace it and advocate it as the bulwark of millennia-proved heterosexually normative corporate democracy? Mind you, those genetically modified lab species were taken away by the Chinese scientist!

Sunshine (2007)

The Sun doesn't shine on everyone equally, or A tale of Big Sister and Little Brother

[6 May 2015]

The Sun is Earth's common property - it is, however, no human law that it shines more over, say, the Sahara Desert, and less, say, Reykjavik, so it is in a way a naturally biased distribution that living beings have learned to adapt to. Still, human beings seem to remain an exception. In this sci-fi installment about a mission on the way to save the dying Sun, the closer they get to the source of sunshine, the longer the shadows of the unconscious that prove how deeply the natural unfairness (as seen on the example of the Sun not shining equally on everyone) has shaped the cultural unfairness of the human beings. This movie says it with the utmost clarity: if there is anyone who needs to die first, it's going to be non-white people. Let's see: the first to go is an Asian, followed by a conveniently exotic (Maori)-looking native, then another Asian, then en passant one undistinguished character easily taken for a Latino, and finally another Asian. The survivors are all impeccably white saviors of the day.

Interesting about this racial constellation is that it is seemingly totally arbitrary, i.e. no character actually offers any clue as to why he or she has been chosen for that certain task. A Maori is as good a psychologist as he would have been a captain, and a Japanese as good a captain as he would have been a biologist etc. On this level, the movie pretends well to merely incidentally kill off the non-white people first since that could have befallen anyone. But there is another level of the movie that shows a much more structured and conscious acting-out of antinomies of the human psyche. This becomes apparent first in a somewhat veiled way: when one of the crew, a male physicist, records a video message to his "loved ones", it is noticeable that there is no "girlfriend" there. We are thus made aware that there are absolutely no sexual issues addressed in the interactions of the crew. No-one has a boner, no-one has a crush on anyone, and no-one seems to have any boyfriends and girlfriends. This is, however, crucial to understanding of the movie's finale. There is, namely, one "excessive" member of the crew that seems to transcend their limitations as experts in the field, and subtly knows more than they with their post-PhD level of knowledge. This member is the female Icarus, all-knowing voiced computer that provides them with all sorts of data, from their personalities to heliophysics. But contrary to the expectations, this time the computer is not the antagonist to the humans, but to its own kin - God (in fact, another "excessive" member on board!).

The introduction of God happens here in a cinematically rather muddled way, but the idea is here: God is a destructive, fiery force that won't let any mortal approach it without fatal consequences. The point here, however, is that God got it all wrong. It's not the humans that he must fight with, but the Voice of Wisdom that transcends them and guides them impersonated as a computer. He must fight with Sophia, the Supreme Knowledge that endangers His inflated ego who thinks that He is the one and only God that people should awe and praise, and doesn't want them to know that She existed way before Himself! That is to say, God does try to make an impression on humans by doing His various fire tricks, but in the eyes of Wisdom - His Big Sister - He is exactly that: her Little Brother! Little Brother that throws tantrums that may scare humans, but more or less just annoys His Big Sister. He is a constellation of many folks' mythologies where God as the little brother wrecks havoc on Earth just out of mischief, but is eventually subdued or punished by his big sister (like Amaterasu and Susano-o in Japanese mythology - since the captain of the crew is a Japanese). So the crew is just a vehicle for the fight between two opposing transcendental forces which, however, are not complementary as in a love relationship, but hierarchical and characterized by stages of psychological development: older Big Sister, the Computer, who is wise , all-knowing and reliable, and younger Little Brother, God, who is immature, conceited and destructive. That is why there are no sexual relationships between the members of the crew, and that is also why the last message from the Sun to the Earth is that from brother to sister. This message acts as a point of reference for the movie's own flawed dramaturgy: killing off non-white people first is an act of religious prejudice ignited and sustained by immature, intolerant God, but making this known exactly by the way of introducing a point of (transcendent) reference is an act of confession how wrong God is, and how humans would be far better off had they listened more to the Wisdom, His Big Sister.

La cueva (2014)

The Future of Democratic Liberation As Seen Through the Anus

[12 November 2014]

Except for pornography, there are not many mainstream (in various degrees) movies that expose a man's anus directly on the camera, but should you start counting them this intense Spanish horror movie would serve as a willing starter. And not only does it expose a man's anus, it also dives deep into it.

The premise of the movie in speleological terms is quite simple: a group of people - they're not exactly what you'd call young adults, nor are they really friends - goes vacating on some desolate coast where they find an entrance to a cave, go into it to explore it, get lost, and troubles emerge. Although speleologists will object that without a helmet in a cave system through which you need to crawl there's practically nil chance that your head will remain in one piece, but generally they will agree that while if getting lost in complete darkness your doom is sealed, with several handy, sturdy flashlights and even night-vision device your chances are much better.

The silence of the speleologists begins, however, when we see a cave not as a cave but as an anus. More precisely, the entrance to the cave as the anus, and the cave system as a whole as the human intestines. This way the logic of the story gains better consistency, and succeeds in sublimating the message of the movie far more thoroughly than if resorting to anything supernatural. In fact, the movie could not be closer to "natural" than it is! It is an act of digestion and excretion, lending the "found video" genre a tight dramaturgic structure : as the process of digestion suggests, what goes in, comes out, which is the optimistic view of the adventure (some might come out again), but before it comes out, it must be eaten and dissolved - the dark horror inside the human intestines.

But it is crucial once again to stress the importance of the exposed anus of one of the male characters. It is no coincidence that this anus belongs to the one who will be, firstly, responsible for leading others deep into the cave (intestinal) system, secondly, devouring them, and thirdly, getting stuck himself. For here we are not dealing simply with any intestinal system, but with a system that is human malice.

Human malice is - in intestinal terms - digestion gone wrong. It is a cry for freedom (excretion) getting stuck, more specifically, getting stuck in its own devouring mechanism which then produces more excreta and further worsens the condition of constipation. It is a self-defecating program, as it were, that eventually kills its host, in a way literally drowning it in its own excreta: just as the character to whom the anus belongs is the most eager to liberate others from the cave by way of democratic legitimacy (here we can think of the USA liberating other countries under the aegis of democratic consent), so is he also the one who pushes the idea of liberation over the top. He crosses the fine line and turns the noble deed into malice, a constipation just contrary to the excretion (liberation) as the final goal, a retention of excreta that drowns its subject.

The importance of the anus belonging to a male rather than a female - after all, inside the cave the hand-held camera catches female behinds many times thus suggesting that the cave-intestinal system might be gender unbiased - lies in the fact that the intestinal system and human malice merge in one specific point, and that is male misogyny. The cave- intestinal system as a speleological-biological environment may be neutral per se, but when infused with male misogyny and chauvinism it becomes a signifier of human malice that is as deeply rooted and dark as intestines/cave themselves. And this provides yet another sharp edge to the message of the movie: if liberating others by the force of democracy may ostensibly be seen as the prerogative of the "enlightened" West (here you might notice the role of flashlights inside the cave), with this misogynous element the liberal-democratic stance comes to transcend this limitation and becomes a far more universal force that can fit any political (and economic, corporate etc.) entity anywhere precisely because of the darkness (and deep rootedness) of misogyny as its constitutive part. In other words, if you find yourself stuck deep inside misogynist intestines (a.k.a. ideology, corporation, profit etc.), beware if you get offered help by the same misogynist in whose intestines you got stuck.

Lost (2004–2010)

They did it for love. And for Daddies. And for guns.

[9 July 2014]

Some accuse this show that the scenario for it was being written on the go, that it was being made up as it went along. It sure does contain many Ed Woodian slips of the tongue, especially when the characters constantly ask each other where they are, what they are doing there, why they have never noticed this and that before etc. But that's exactly what the scenario wants you to believe because it's a part of it! The series namely do possess a master plan, a grand design, a focal point to which it all leads to. It may not be as obvious as the arguments for the on-going making up of the story, but it is intricate enough to stand the test of time and prove itself relevant. Here are the main invariables of this grand design. Firstly, when we overview some of the main characters (although we could do that for any character lost out there) we find some basic resemblance between them (apart from being all dead): Jack ... finds himself on the island, inseminates several characters, has serious Daddy issues; Sawyer ... finds himself on the island, inseminates many characters, has serious Daddy issues; Kate ... finds herself on the island, gets inseminated several times, has serious Daddy issues; John Locke ... finds himself on the island, insemination activity is hinted at, has serious Daddy issues; Michael ... finds himself on the island, inseminates a character, has serious Daddy issues; Charlie ... finds himself on the island, inseminates many characters, has Daddy issues; Sun and Jin ... find themselves on the island, proceed to insemination, have serious patriarchal issues; Hugo ... finds himself on the island, insemination activity is hinted at, has Daddy issues; Sayid ... finds himself on the island, insemination activity is hinted at, is from Iraq, the epitome of Daddy issues (for the USA anyway); Claire ... finds herself on the island, is inseminated, has Daddy issues; Ben ... finds himself on the island, insemination activity is hinted at, has serious Daddy issues; Juliet ... finds herself on the island, insemination activity is hinted at, is an expert on insemination anyway; Ana Lucia ... finds herself on the island, gets inseminated, has Mommy issues; Desmond ... finds himself on the island, inseminates a character, has Daddy issues. And so on. The pattern is very clear and it pertains to the very end (especially as the theme of insemination keeps popping up all the time).

Then, secondly, there's another thread that the series never digress from. It can be described thus: Jack ... when HE gets a gun he's in charge; Sawyer ... when HE gets a gun he's in charge; Kate ... when SHE gets a gun she's in charge; John Locke ... when HE gets a gun he's in charge; Michael ... when HE gets a gun he's in charge; Charlie ... when HE gets a gun he's in charge; Sun and Jin ... when THEY get a gun they're in charge; Hugo ... when HE gets a gun he's in charge; Sayid ... when HE gets a gun he's in charge. And so on. This pattern is almost quintessential of the series because without it no one would probably want to do anything but wait for the rescue.

So in light of this masterfully devised plan we can produce some deep-meaning answers that the critics in the "making things up as it goes along" camp fail to see. 1.) Whenever there's a nuclear bomb going off you can be pretty much sure it is because someone wants to inseminate someone ("is doing it FOR HER" etc.) 2.) Heterosexuality is karmic. 3.) The island needs to be protected because heterosexuality needs to be protected.

Which brings us to the all-time core of the question of the mystery of the island. The island is an ovum, and people who inhabit it and try constantly to kill each other off are spermatozoa that compete for the insemination of the ovum. Or, in subtler terms, airplane on the Oceanic 815 flight is penis penetrating vagina, that is, entering the island's airspace, and its crashing is ejaculation, that is, ejecting people (sperm) out, and once ejaculated they try to find their way around the island, arriving eventually to its center - a yellow-lit cave that is an ovum. In the end there's only one who wins (one sperm that inseminates the ovum), and he gets to be the guardian of the island. All other candidates are then dispensed, and, if lucky (which here they are), squirted out (into the light, presumably).

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Deprivation as the core of menstrual symbolism

[26 May 2007]

What exactly do the events inside the labyrinth, or underground, mean? It's very simple, you only need to perform a simple operation of addition, that is to sum up 1 + 1. First, the frog beneath the tree. The frog, we learn, is DEPRIVING the tree of its nutrition, DEPRIVING it of its vital fluids, so to speak, and thus hindering its growth. What Ofelia does is destroying the frog and eliminating the state of deprivation. Second, the banquet hall with the creature, the Pale Man. He, seemingly, has been depriving human beings of their nutrition for a long time, by gathering food on his table and not letting anyone touch it. He, actually, is DEPRIVATION itself, personified, or, better maybe, monsterified. He thrives on deprivation. And again, what Ofelia does is, if not destroying him, at least tricking him and thus de-personifying him, making him a monster with a flaw, which is as much as eliminating him, for there can nothing much be left of him if his act of depriving others is not total. And third, Ofelia doesn't let the otherwise benevolent faun (Pan) hurt her newly-born brother, that is, she doesn't let the brother be DEPRIVED of even one single drop of blood. Instead, she gets deprived of her own blood, and with it her own life. One should note only that not merely a life, but her GIRLHOOD life.

So, what does this sum up to? It sums up to a very obvious (but not at all clumsy!) SYMBOLISM OF MENSTRUATION. Ofelia grows into a woman, a very self-conscious and world-understanding woman (just the kind Mercedes is; note that Mercedes is the only one who ever mentions the labyrinth and seems to know that there lives a faun a little girl needs to meet ...), the one who realizes that ONLY WOMEN ARE ALLOWED TO BE DEPRIVED (of their menstrual blood) in order to grow up, to understand themselves and the world around, and that deprivation of any other living being leads only to disaster, just like the tree had been deprived by the frog and the children by the Pale Man. And the Captain - the male - of his vital fluids by his father!

The movie shows how wrong it is if a male gets deprived. He simply can't bare the notion that anything of or on him would disappear. This is exactly the notion the Captain's father leaves over to his son - the notion of year, month, day, hour, minute and second of his DISAPPEARANCE, of his deprivation of life. That's why the Captain panics, and all he is now able to understand about what is going on around him is disappearing of others and REMAINING OF HIMSELF, himself now and here, and himself projected onto his son. All he sees in the present, as well as in the past and in the future, is himself. He exists as a particle of a genetic lineage, and this genetic lineage - his father and his son - is essentially identified as his own self. The brutality of the Captain is thus the brutality of a self-centered male ego who cannot understand the gaps life needs to embrace in order to continue, in other words, the brutality of a male fearing his own disappearance and invalidation.

The magic, on the other side, is by no means lacking in Pan's Labyritnh. The labyrinth is always present, never is there a moment that would leave you grumpily wonder why there is not more of the labyrinth. It sure isn't Disneyland with all the characters and stories and adventures neatly packed in an instant-food-like arrangement. It lingers in your mind, creeping deeper and deeper into your unconscious darkness. And their is one genuinely magical, touching moment, very short, but so effective that pierces your heart. The moment when Pan returns.

10 (excellent)

The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

What is there supposed to be so-called scary??

[16 May 2007]

Nothing.

But there's another, better question: what are empty houses for? To immediately have an instant sex there! When at the beginning of any movie a male and a female have sex (as if they'd been impatiently waiting for the movie to begin in order only to finally get a chance to have sex; now, haven't they done it before?? Do characters in movies always start as virgins?), so, when he and she have sex, in most cases it means we're going to be watching a heterosexual man challenged to prove and re-confirm not only his heterosexuality, but the heterosexuality of the whole (female) world. In "The Mothman Prophecies", too, the male reasons thus: since I am a male, I am heterosexual, and whatever females do - even if they die or leave or get in danger - they do so merely in order to let me be and look like a heterosexual. So, Mothman's prophecies actually hit it right! The woman will call. Even if you don't pick up the phone, even if you disconnect it, the woman will keep calling, either from the otherworld, or from below the water. Because the movie must reassure its male viewers, and teach its female ones, that the sole reason for a female to exist (or disappear!) in this world is her desire for a male, and that her interest in males is permanent and essential. "I want you to be happy." = "I give you a license to be a heterosexual and to get yourself (another) woman." Richard Gere is relieved: the Mothman has assured him that all a woman is thinking about is - he himself. A woman is and must be permanently and unquestionably interested in (and dependant on!) male. And the audiences stay heterosexual. The scariest part thus begins where the movie ends.

1 (awful).